Who's On First?

While indulging in the Austin tradition of live music and adult beverages at a venerable spot well-known for excellence in both categories, I was queried about my occupation by a fellow patron. My instinctive response in these circumstances is to keep it as simple as possible: "I sell rare books . . ." immediately followed by ". . . on the Internet." This is a good conversational gambit, since I leave it up to my interrogator whether or not more attention is warranted. I'm comfortable leaving it at that, since bars aren't the best place to talk shop. This time was different. "First editions? I can dig it," came the immediate response. Human nature. There's no getting around it.

". . . Humans are wired to rank things," said Dr. William Pollack, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Caring about who is best comes from a function that originally has to do with survival," he said. "You would want the person who represented you in your tribe to be the best at it -- because without them being the best, or winning, you might starve to death or be attacked. That part is neurologically set in. We are ranking and ordered animals." [Alan Schwarz: "'The Greatest': What a Concept" The New York Times, June 14, 2009] Or anything Tom Wolfe produced under the new Journalism label.

The First Edition is the foundation on which the Rare Book field rests. This isn't likely to change, since the immutable law of the First Edition is like gravity, immune to technological advances. Like the Dude, it abides.

The siren call of the First Edition led me to collect books in the first place: Kerouac, Burroughs, Willeford, etc. The physical work collecting and harvesting these editions was great, but intellectually it left something to be desired. Other than the colophon and the design of the jacket rear panel, is there any difference between a First Edition of ON THE ROAD and the second (or third) edition published in September 1957? I've got copies in front of me and physically there ain't no difference. But here's the thing that drove me crazy back in the day -- the First Edition generates an "aura." That Aura is as tangible as the slowly fading magenta on the Dust jacket spine.

Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" used the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. According to Benjamin, this aura inheres not in the object itself but rather in external attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. Aura is thus indicative of art's traditional association with primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power and its further association with magic and (religious or secular) ritual. With the advent of art's mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in which there is no actual original, the experience of art could be freed from place and ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the aura. "For the first time in world history," Benjamin wrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."

Since I am a lot more comfortable discussing my beloved San Antonio Spurs than Walter Benjamin in a bar, I took the easy way out. "I sell Design Books, so First Editions really don't hold much sway," I replied. I further explained that Design Books tend to exist primarily in singular editions, so the distinction is pretty much moot. At that point the talk veered toward architecture and how the glut of high-rise construction in the West Campus area was forever destroying the fabric of the neighborhood. Then we rocked out and everybody went home.

Afterwards I thought about my simplistic, slightly misanthropic response and vowed to do better next time. The spectre of the First Edition does that to me, alighting like a jeering masturbating raven on my shoulder, making me defensive about my vocation, like a slowly drowning Southerner extolling the virtue of Nathan Bedford Forrester. I don't traffic in First Editions, I sell Design Books, darn it.

Elaine Lustig Cohen once dismissed the whole First Edition subculture with a wave of her hand, bracelets softly clinking, underscoring her point -- "THOSE people don't care about books." Ouch.

Are we kidding ourselves? By and large, First Edition culture doesn't intrude too far into the Design Book field (PhotoBooks excepted of course), but my ON THE ROAD comparison makes me want to take the Pepsi Challenge. Let's do it.

Here's a first edition:


Walter Gropius: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS. London/New York: Faber and Faber/the Museum of Modern Art [n.d. circa 1936]. Octavo. Cream cloth stamped in red. 80 pp. 16 plates. Dust jacket design by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The first U.S. edition features an introduction by Joseph Hudnutt, while the true first (U. K.) edition is introduced by Frank Pick.

The dust jacket features an example of Moholy-Nagy's "Rhodoid" technique: photographing a composition through glass or other transparent material to catch the shadow cast on the background. Very cool indeed. This book looks and feels like a true artifact of the age, properly English and suitably Avant-garde.

Here's a second edition:


Walter Gropius: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS. Newton, MA: Charles Branford [Faber and Faber], 1956. Octavo. Black cloth stamped in white. 80 pp. 16 plates. Dust jacket is a fairly mediocre, one-color variant of the original 1935 Moholy-Nagy design. "In the style of" seems the best sobriquet for describing this jacket. Third impression, (first American edition thus), bound from Faber sheets, including the English Preface by Frank Pick. This edition has a trimmed Branford label pasted over the Faber information on the title page.

This edition feels Americanized, with the monochromatic jacket and the binary severity of the decorated cloth. The MoMA first edition wins on style points, that's for sure. The collector naturally prefers the earlier edition, but both have their particular merits. The variant of the later printing is certainly interesting in its own right. Completists take note.

But at the end of the day, either of these editions holds a candle to my 1935 English First Edition. And not because it's the TRUE first edition. Not at all. Virtually the same as the above-referenced 1936 MoMA edition, my copy was inscribed to Julian Huxley in February 1937, the month before Gropius left England to head Hudnutt's Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Trust me on this -- this book has an Aura.